1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management computer, and particularly to a management computer used to construct or operate a backup configuration of application data in a computing system.
2. Related Art
In environments such as a data center for a business enterprise and the like, a huge amount of data needs to be processed at high speed. Such environments may employ the following technique to effectively use storage resources. Specifically, a volume group is formed from one or more physical volumes, and one or more logical volumes are created from the volume group. This technique is called a Logical Volume Management (hereinafter called “LVM”) function, and for example, can be used on UNIX-like OSs including Linux®. Each of the logical volumes created by the LVM function is allocated an application that uses the logical volume, and operation is performed.
Usually, data stored in a logical volume of a storage by an application is protected from faults, such as a failure of a disk that configures the logical volume, for example, by backup of the data in another logical volume that forms a pair together with the logical volume. Meanwhile, an application operated without a backup at the beginning may require a backup configuration construction after starting operation of the application due to an increase in significance of the application.
In such case, in response to a request for a backup for each application, it is necessary to identify a physical volume used by the application currently operating and to form a pair consisting of a primary volume and a secondary volume for the backup. There is a technique for simplifying the above-mentioned operation by reducing a construction procedure of a backup configuration of an application (for example, described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2005-11311). In this technique, a physical volume used by the application is identified from configuration information of the application, and is used as a backup source.
According to the invention disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2005-11311, in an environment where a plurality of applications use the same volume group, all of the physical volumes that constitute the volume group used by the application specified for backup configuration construction are used as the backup source. In this case, data of applications other than the specified application also becomes a backup target.
For example, assume that each of the plurality of applications has a different administrator. In this case, when the backup of the specified application is performed with the above-mentioned configuration, an administrator of the other application cannot know that the data managed by the administrator himself/herself has been copied to the secondary volume.
Accordingly, even when the administrator deletes the data on the primary volume side, the backed up data remains on the secondary volume side without the administrator having a chance of knowing such fact. In this case, this leads to a problem that even when, for example, an illegal access or the like is made on the secondary volume side to have the data read, the administrator of the other application may not be able to find the illegal access.
An object of the present invention is to provide a management computer enabling construction of a backup configuration of one particular application data, without influencing data of another application.